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Wire & Cable ASIA – September/October 2011
46
From the
americas
Mr Hirsch offered a current status report on Volkswagen in
the US, where recently the company has recovered some
ground.
According to Autodata Corp, the VW brand sold
256,830 vehicles there last year, a 20% gain from 2009 but
only about half of the annual total during the boom years of
the 1970s.
Over the first four months of this year, the company’s
US sales were up 17%. The VW nameplate ranked 29
th
of
34 brands in the J D Power and Associates’ 2011 reliability
rankings of cars after three years of ownership. It ranked
31
st
of 33 brands in Power’s 2010 initial quality survey of
vehicles three months old.
❖
But, as Frank Fischer, chief executive of Volkswagen
Group of America, Chattanooga Operations, told
Mr Hirsch: “We have really tried to draw our lessons from
the Westmoreland experience.”
The Chattanooga plant, in a 1,400-acre complex on
the site of a former explosives factory, has a different
management structure from that at VW’s previous
location. As described by Mr Hirsch, managers of the
failed factory closeted themselves in Detroit and were
rarely present in Pennsylvania.
This time, he wrote: “VW pulled in more than 200 company
experts from operations around the world, including
its high-end Audi and Bentley divisions, to work at the
factory.”
❖
As for the product, present plans call for Chattanooga to
produce 56,000 vehicles during its first year of operation,
although VW officials say the number could change.
The Passat to be built there was designed specifically
for the US buyer and will not be sold in Europe. It has
an additional three inches of rear seat room, and the
standard model offers options believed to be expected
by Americans, such as Bluetooth wireless and dual-zone
climate control.
It starts at 170 horsepower, providing the type of merging
and freeway acceleration American drivers often associate
with safety and security. The sticker price of a model with
manual transmission will be about $20,000. Automatic-
transmission models and versions with larger engines,
including a turbocharged diesel expected to allow 43miles
of highway driving per gallon of fuel, will be priced at about
$26,000. The
Los Angeles Times
’s man in Chattanooga
observed: “VW needs [this] vehicle to be a success.”
Elsewhere in automotive . . .
❖
Honda Motor Co, the third-largest Japanese car maker,
said on 27
th
May that its North American production would
return to normal in August as parts suppliers recovered
from the tsunami and earthquake that hit Japan in March.
In the US, only production of Honda’s Civic cars will
continue to be slowed by limited supplies of some
parts, the Tokyo-based company said in a statement.
Production of the 2012 Civic, which reached US dealers’
showrooms in April, will be at about 50%, Honda said.
Economics
Does the US offer a more favourable
economic climate for small and new
businesses than appears from Paris?
Recently, the “Economix” blog of the
International Herald
Tribune
looked at some new data from the Organisation
for Economic Cooperation and Development. The Paris-
based OECD, a forum of 34 democracies dedicated to
the promotion of world trade, found the small-business
presence in the United States to be somewhat weaker than
in peer countries.
Catherine Rampell, who posted the blog, begged to differ.
She wrote: “By many measurements America appears to
have an economic environment that is far friendlier to small
and new companies.” (“Nurturing Start-Ups and Small
Businesses around the World,” 30
th
June). Ms Rampell cited
the administrative burden required to start a new company,
which by the OECD’s own reckoning is relatively low in the
United States.
A composite measure of the “procedures, time, and costs
necessary to incorporate and register a new firm with up to
50 employees and start-up capital of 10 times the economy’s
per-capita gross national income” was applied. This metric
found Mexico and China to be the most restrictive; Ireland
and Germany, the least. The US is on the less-restrictive end
of the spectrum.
And, according to a Brussels-based agency of the European
Commission and an OECD neighbour, entrepreneurs are
looked upon especially favourably by Americans.
The latest annual survey by the Directorate General Enterprise
and Industry was conducted between 10
th
December
2009 and 16
th
January 2010, and covered 36 countries. In
response to a request for “your opinion about entrepreneurs
(self-employed, business owners),” 73.4% of Americans
polled said they had a “rather favourable” attitude toward
this group. That was among the most positive responses
gathered by the survey.
❖
In closing, “Economix” asked: “Given a climate so
favourable to entrepreneurs, what might account for
the fact that self-employment and other measures of
entrepreneurship are lower in the United States than in
many other developed countries?”
Many American companies too young or
too small for access to capital markets in
the US are finding investors overseas
A possible answer to the rhetorical question posed at the
end of the previous item may be that, however favourable
their other circumstances, fledgling and small American
enterprises need money – and this essential commodity is in
tighter supply at home than abroad. Graham Bowley of the
International Herald Tribune
has written: “Nearly one in ten
American companies that went public last year did so outside